Skits

Today I split the class into groups of about 5-6 to prepare skits. They were to explain a part of the government of Saudi Arabia to the rest of the class.

It went OK. However, there were a lot of issues within the groups. I split them by having the students count off 1-5. So, first student says 1, that's their group. Student next to them says 2, that's their group. And so on. I thought it would help randomly assign then and keep the friends away from each other. I not sure how well that worked, because then people who didn't get along were together and didn't want to work.

I did two Minor Incident Reports (when the student has 3 of these they get a referral) while the students were in their groups. One was for a girl who called another student "gay". And, the other was for a student who told another to "F off". Of course he didn't just say the letter F. They will both get to enjoy silent lunch.

Some of the teams did really well. One student did a great rap with the support of his team. Most did not do so well, and I am pretty sure most of the students did not learn much. There was also a writing portion of the class where they wrote home while on vacation in Saudi Arabia, about how different Saudi Arabia was from the United States. By reading their letters, I know that most of them learned that women cannot vote in Saudi Arabia.

So, I learned a lot from the experience, and if I do skits again it will be done differently.
Tomorrow I am trying a jigsaw. More on that later...